Tel Aviv-based behavioral biometrics firm BioCatch Ltd. said today it has raised $145 million in a Series C investment round, bringing its total funding to more than $186 million.

The company, which was founded in 2011, operates a cloud service that collects and analyzes more than 2,000 cognitive parameters, which are a combination of characteristics and behaviors, to generate unique user profiles.

The platform continuously authenticates users during online sessions to verify consistent behavior. That approach protects against difficult-to-detect cyberthreats such as account takeovers, hijacked remote access sessions and rat-in-the-browser attacks, in which a trojan inserts itself as an invisible middleman in a web interaction.

BioCatch has been awarded more than 70 patents for the techniques it uses to detect factors such as tremors and keystroke pressure that are useful in identifying sophisticated cyberattacks such as social engineering scams, device spoofing, malware, bots and remote access attacks. It says its system can identify anomalies in a session even when no profile exists, such as when a person applies for a credit card under an assumed identity.

“It compares what you do online with a personalized model of your past behavior and to our existing data set of 90 million behavioral profiles,” Chief Executive Howard Edelstein said in an interview in Traders Magazine last December. “If you logged into your bank account and had a friend sit down at your machine, within five seconds the bank would know that it’s no longer you operating the computer based on your friend’s online behavior alone.”

BioCatch said its approach has gained particular relevance during the current COVID-19 pandemic as large numbers of people have moved from relatively secure office settings to home environments. “The current environment has spawned a large increase in bad actors seeking to take advantage of distracted individuals working from home or dispersed companies whose technologists are scattered in remote locations,” Edelstein said in a statement.

The company signed its first e-commerce client last year and is planning to launch in the public sector in 2020. It said annual recurring revenue grew by 150% in 2019 and that more than 40 of the world’s largest global financial institutions have signed on as customers.

The funding round was led by Bain Capital LP’s Tech Opportunities fund with additional investments by Industry Ventures LLC and existing investors American Express Ventures, CreditEase Corp., Maverick Ventures Inc. and OurCrowd Ltd.

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